Suzan is a 23 year old 4th year medical student. She uses Linux because she does not want viruses or trojans, and finds Linux is quicker on her 3 year old laptop than Windows XP. She does not understand programming and has no need to change the way the computer works.

She can use the OpenOffice programs proficiently, but does not know what a package is. She wants to install cool applications to talk to her friends online and send and receive emails.

She watches DVD's with her friends on her laptop every now and then and occasionally plays other media files sent to her by her medical colleagues. She absolutely loves facebook and twitter.

If there are any problems with her computer, she rings her brother who is a Linux expert. He can normally walk her through problems on the phone to get the problem sorted. Suzan has a low speed dial up connection that she uses a few times a week for up to 40 minutes.

Bevan is a 30 year old computer wizz and an adrenaline junkie. He is an expert in Microsoft products and is starting to play with live CD's on popular Linux distributions.

He wants ultimately to replace his Windows XP installation with a Linux installation, and also wants to play with the latest stuff like compiz and also experiment by trying to compile software from source.

He wants to install and run some of the proprietary Windows programs on his Linux computer. He also has a 40Gb MP3 music collection and many hundreds of gigabytes of media files that he shares on the LAN with other computers on the network.

He has lots of cool hardware that he's acquired over the years. He expects this hardware to "just work" with his Linux install. He understands the concept of packages, but does not know all the names of common applications. Bevan is quite comfortable partitioning his disk when installing. Bevan has a unlimited bandwidth high speed broadband internet connection.

Graham is a 55 year old retired painter and decorator. Graham's son has installed Linux on their new computer and moved away to university. Graham does not know much about computers, and gets quite confused when application icons change or if the start button is moved. Graham uses GNOME as it's simpler, but does now know what it means. Needless to say, Graham doesn't understand packages or dependencies.

He has been doing automatic updates when using Windows XP, and was also updating the virus scanner by hand. He expects Linux to keep itself updated and just notify him when it's done. Words like "security" scare Graham, and a phone call to his son is expected if anything technical pops up on the screen he doesn't understand.

He does not generally add or remove software from his computer but does like to dabble with Latex as he is writing a book. Every now and then latex asks him to install a package for a new font or layout, but he normally just ignores it.

His son is often away for many months, and so Graham may have to perform distro upgrades in a way he can understand. Words like "partitioning" and "boot sector" scare him considerably. Graham has a low bandwidth broadband package that limits him to 1GB a month. He says that when files are downloading, "the Internet gets slower".